1. the-star-stuff:

    Strange Places on Mars

    #1. The image above shows a dune field on the floor of a crater made by an asteroid impact.

    #2. This image of layered deposits on a plateau in the Valles Marineris region of Mars was taken in 2007 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image shows about three-fourths of a mile across. Scientists think the layers contain opaline silica and iron sulfates formed through alteration by acidic water.

    #3. This image is of the carbon dioxide ice cap at the south pole of Mars. The pattern is formed by the ice vaporizing. Scientists think that as the ice cap melts from the bottom up, the carbon dioxide turns directly into gas. It flows beneath the ice to openings, eroding the ground below into a spiderlike network of troughs. The flowing gas also carries dust that escapes with it and settles into fan-shaped deposits on top of the ice.

    #4. The stripes in this image are linear dunes on the floor of a crater in the Noachis Terra region of Mars. The dark areas are the dunes, and the lighter boulder-strewn lines are between the dunes. This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Dec. 28, 2009.

    #5. This image looks remarkably like groves of trees growing among Martian dunes. But, the trees are an optical illusion. They are actually dark streaks of sediment on the downwind side of the dunes. They were created by escaping gas from the evaporating carbon dioxide ice below. The bottom of the ice melts into vapor and moves toward holes in the ice, carrying dark sediment along with it that is then deposited when the gas escapes.

    #6. Scientists have found evidence of iron-bearing sulfates and clay minerals in the exposed areas of this region of the Noctis Labyrinthus formation. A dune field covers some of the ground.

    #7. This false-color image looks like it could be of the desert southwest in North America. These gully channels running from a cliff area near the crater rim show typical shapes made by water-carved streams on Earth. The image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

    #8. This image shows an area within Proctor Crater that has both dunes and ripples. The smaller, brighter ridges are ripples made of very fine sand. The larger, darker forms are dunes made of dust from dark volcanic rocks. This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in February 2009. 

    Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

  2. ikenbot: North America Nebula Burns Bright in Skywatcher Photo The gas and dust of the North America Nebula glow pink and red in this skywatcher photo. The North America Nebula lies in the constellation Cygnus, and it takes its name from a supposed resemblence to the continent. It is an emission nebula — essentially, a cloud of high-temperature gas emitting light of various colors. The image was taken by Jean-Luc Dauvergne in August 2007 from the observatory at the Pic du Midi mountain in the French Pyrenees. The skyscape in the image glowing most brightly is the most active part of the nebula, a region astronomers call the Cygnus Wall. Here, hydrogen gas burns where new stars are forming. The North America Nebula, also known as NGC 7000, is roughly 1,800 light-years away and perhaps 100 light-years in diameter. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

    ikenbot:

    North America Nebula Burns Bright in Skywatcher Photo

    The gas and dust of the North America Nebula glow pink and red in this skywatcher photo.

    The North America Nebula lies in the constellation Cygnus, and it takes its name from a supposed resemblence to the continent. It is an emission nebula — essentially, a cloud of high-temperature gas emitting light of various colors.

    The image was taken by Jean-Luc Dauvergne in August 2007 from the observatory at the Pic du Midi mountain in the French Pyrenees. The skyscape in the image glowing most brightly is the most active part of the nebula, a region astronomers call the Cygnus Wall. Here, hydrogen gas burns where new stars are forming.

    The North America Nebula, also known as NGC 7000, is roughly 1,800 light-years away and perhaps 100 light-years in diameter. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

  3. ikenbot: Time Need Not End In The Multiverse Imaged Above: Ultimate guide to the Multiverse Gamblers already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all. It all started with this thought experiment. In a back room in a Las Vegas casino, you are handed a fair coin to flip. You will not be allowed to see the outcome, and the moment the coin lands you will fall into a deep sleep. If the coin lands heads up, the dealer will wake you 1 minute later; tails, in 1 hour. Upon waking, you will have no idea how long you have just slept. The dealer smiles: would you like to bet on heads or tails? Knowing it’s a fair coin, you assume your odds are 50/50, so you choose tails. But the house has an advantage. The dealer knows you will almost certainly lose, because she is factoring in something you haven’t: that we live in a multiverse. The idea that our universe is just one of many crops up in a number of physicists’ best theories, including inflation. It posits that different parts of space are always ballooning into separate universes, so that our observable universe is just a tiny island in an exponentially growing multiverse. In any infinite multiverse, everything that can happen, will happen - an infinite number of times. That has created a major headache for cosmologists, who want to use probabilities to make predictions, such as the strength of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our own universe. How can we say that anything is more or less probable than anything else? Read on..

    ikenbot:

    Time Need Not End In The Multiverse

    Imaged Above: Ultimate guide to the Multiverse

    Gamblers already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all.

    It all started with this thought experiment. In a back room in a Las Vegas casino, you are handed a fair coin to flip. You will not be allowed to see the outcome, and the moment the coin lands you will fall into a deep sleep. If the coin lands heads up, the dealer will wake you 1 minute later; tails, in 1 hour. Upon waking, you will have no idea how long you have just slept.

    The dealer smiles: would you like to bet on heads or tails? Knowing it’s a fair coin, you assume your odds are 50/50, so you choose tails. But the house has an advantage. The dealer knows you will almost certainly lose, because she is factoring in something you haven’t: that we live in a multiverse.

    The idea that our universe is just one of many crops up in a number of physicists’ best theories, including inflation. It posits that different parts of space are always ballooning into separate universes, so that our observable universe is just a tiny island in an exponentially growing multiverse.

    In any infinite multiverse, everything that can happen, will happen - an infinite number of times. That has created a major headache for cosmologists, who want to use probabilities to make predictions, such as the strength of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our own universe. How can we say that anything is more or less probable than anything else?

    Read on..

  4. thenewenlightenmentage: Neptune’s Moons Overview Neptune has 13 known moons. They are composed of rock and ice. Triton has a retrograde orbit. Nereid has a highly elliptical orbit. Voyager 2 discovered 6 of the moons not observable from Earth. Very recently, three more moons, S/2002 N1-3, were discovered from a ground-based telescope in 2002. Description The first four moons of Neptune, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, and Galatea, are so close to Neptune that they orbit within its ring system. Little is known about them. The next one out, Larissa, was actually discovered in 1981, when it blocked a star. This was attributed to the ring arcs, but later was found to be the moon, being re-discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989. Proteus is the second-largest moon in orbit around Neptune. It is so close to the planet that Earth-bound telescopes cannot see it. Read More

    thenewenlightenmentage:

    Neptune’s Moons

    Overview

    Neptune has 13 known moons. They are composed of rock and ice. Triton has a retrograde orbit. Nereid has a highly elliptical orbit. Voyager 2 discovered 6 of the moons not observable from Earth. Very recently, three more moons, S/2002 N1-3, were discovered from a ground-based telescope in 2002.

    Description

    The first four moons of Neptune, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, and Galatea, are so close to Neptune that they orbit within its ring system. Little is known about them.

    The next one out, Larissa, was actually discovered in 1981, when it blocked a star. This was attributed to the ring arcs, but later was found to be the moon, being re-discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989.

    Proteus is the second-largest moon in orbit around Neptune. It is so close to the planet that Earth-bound telescopes cannot see it.

    Read More

  5. kidsneedscience:

    The word quasar is a contraction of the words quasi and stellar, defined as a massive and extremely remote celestial object, emitting exceptionally large amounts of energy, which typically has a starlike image in a telescope. It has been suggested that quasars contain massive black holes and may represent a stage in the evolution of some galaxies.

    Quasars are so massive and so filled with energy that they defy description:  a quasar can have a trillion times the energy of the sun, more energy than the Milky Way galaxy and all the stars in it.   The quasar that appears brightest in the sky is 3C 273 in the constellation of Virgo. It has an average apparent magnitude of 12.8 but it has an absolute magnitude of −26.7. From a distance of about 33 light-years, this object would shine in the sky about as brightly as our sun. This quasar’s luminosity is, therefore, about 2 trillion (2 × 1012) times that of our sun, or about 100 times that of the total light of average giant galaxies like our Milky Way.

    Quasar image courtesy John Bahcall (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) Mike Disney (University of Wales) and NASA/ESA.  Image of APM 08279+5255 courtesy of NASA.

    Definition courtesy Oxford Dictionaries.  Background courtesy Wikipedia. 




















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